The Testimony of Hands

"Piki" is a Hopi word for a special bread prepared by dipping
a hand into a batter of finely ground blue corn, then spreading the
batter on a specially prepared, extremly smooth stone griddle, in
a layer about as thick as a sheet of paper. Once the batter has
cooked and dried, but before it becomes stiff, the cook rolls the
resulting sheet of unleavened cornbread into a roll. The piki is then
set aside to dry completely. It takes great skill to spread the piki on
the heated griddle, and then retrieve it, all with bare fingers.

Piki is sometimes compared to corn
flakes but the ash used to prepare the batter gives it a slightly
astringent taste, and the texture is more like that of single layers
of puff pastry. Traditionlly, piki was made at a number of the
Pueblo Indian villages in the U.S. Southwest. Today it is most common
at the Hopi villages, where it most likely originated.

For a photograph of piki
being cooked, including a bowl of the blue corn batter, please click
here.
To see some completed piki (on a Hopi woven platter), please click
here.

The piki stone in this virtual exhibit was found at a prehistoric Pueblo
village a few miles west of the Rio Grande, near Los Lunas, and testifies
to the early widespread popularity of piki in the Pueblo world. The next
photograph shows another view of the stone. The white patch is where
a curator added the catalogue number for the stone. Given the reverence
that many Pueblo people show towards these stones, we wouldn't
put a museum number on the working surface of a piki stone today.

Second view of 98.53.345, piki stone
Photograph by B. Bernard

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